Thursday, December 27, 2012

THE PANOPTICON REVIEW PRESENTS TWENTY OUTSTANDING BOOKS OF 2012


Please Note: The following list of books is not organized according to any personal hierarchy of the relative value of each individual book. Rather it is a list that seriously considers ALL of the books listed here to be of equal intellectual and cultural value and interest, albeit for different reasons. The bottomline on this list is that each one of these books is extraordinary and invaluable in their own right and represents some of the very best writing published in the United States in 2012.
--Kofi Natambu, Editor

End This Depression Now!
by Paul Krugman
W.W. Norton, 2012

Booker T and Them
by Bill Harris
Wayne State University Press,  2012

 The Price of the Ticket:  
Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics
by Fredrick C. Harris
Oxford University Press,  2012
The Last Holiday:  A Memoir
by Gil Scott-Heron
Grove Press,  2012


Predator Nation:  Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America
by Charles H. Ferguson
Crown Business,  2012

Jack Johnson,  Rebel Sojourner:
Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line
by Theresa Runstedtler
University of California Press,  2012

The Indispensable Zinn:  
The Essential Writings of the "People's Historian"
by Howard Zinn  (edited by Timothy Patrick McCarthy)
The New Press,  2012

                   The Black Revolution on Campus
by Martha Biondi
University of California Press,  2012
 
Razor:  Revolutionary Art For Cultural Revolution
by Amiri Baraka
Third World Press,  2012

Occupy the Economy:  Challenging Capitalism
by Richard Wolff  (In Converation with David Barsamian)
Open Media Series
City Lights Books,  2012

                         Samurai among Panthers:  
Richard Aoki On Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life
by Diane C. Fujino
University of Minnesota Press,  2012

Rebuild the Dream
by Van Jones
Nation Books,  2012

Drift:  The Unmooring of American Military Power
by Rachel Maddow
Crown Publishers,  2012
 The Meaning of Freedom 
(And Other Difficult Dialogues)
by Angela Y. Davis
OpenMedia Series
City Lights Books, 2012

Hopeless:  Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion
Edited by Jeffrey St. Clair & Joshua Frank
AK Press,  2012

 
Twilight of the Elites:  America After Meritocracy
by Christopher Hayes
Crown Publishers,  2012

Rebel Cities:  
From the right To the City to the Urban Revolution
by David Harvey
Verso,  2012
The Courage To Hope:  
How I Stood Up To The Politics Of Fear
by Shirley Sherrod
Atria Books,  2012 
J. Edgar Hoover Goes To The Movies:  
The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood's Cold War
by John Sbardellati
Cornel University Press,  2012

Stolen Images:   
Lumumba and the Early Films of Raoul Peck 
by Raoul Peck
(featuring four screenplays translated from the French by Catherine Temerson)
Seven Stories Press,  2012